2018 Winter Olympics: All eyes on South Korea for a fortnight
The eyes of the world have focused on the Korean peninsula regularly over the last year and beyond, though for 16 days starting Friday morning (U.S. time), we can all hope that it will be for peaceful and exciting purposes.
The 23rd Winter Olympic Games are set in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It may seem difficult to believe for a venue located less than an hour's drive from a hostile nuclear-armed dictatorship, but there are many hopes that the next two weeks will represent a return to "order" for an international sports world and an Olympic movement that desperately needs some.
The Olympic Games are a passion of mine. Though I have considered "going nocturnal" for the next two weeks in order to align with the 16-hour time difference between Korea and Minnesota, I will do my best to keep track of these games while the sun shines and to help you do the same. During the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, I enjoyed watching with you and throwing in a little context, a little comedy and a little history behind what you were seeing on TV.
In fact, the first point to understand about Pyeongchang starts in Rio, even though the two cities are 11,311 miles away on opposite sides of the world. Metaphorically, I think the International Olympic Committee would like to keep things that way.
Story after story filled the international press in the summer of 2016 about everything that went wrong in the run-up to Rio 2016: Zika-bearing mosquitoes, the semi-finished Olympic village, raw sewage in the bay that also served as the rowing venue. Pyeongchang has met all the benchmarks it can control.
As for the one it can't ...
Perhaps as a nod to the elephant in the room, you'll see the organizing committee repeatedly render the city's name PyeongChang as an attempt to distinguish it from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
It is hoped that the inclusion of a handful of athletes from the North, including two lines of women's hockey players to join a chimerical joint Korean team, will motivate the Kim regime to not cause trouble during the Games.
The countries are technically still at war, as the Korean War of the 1950s ended with an armistice, not a treaty. However, the North Koreans boycotted the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul entirely, as the Olympic movement made it past the 1980 American and 1984 Soviet boycotts without significant political complications.
What Seoul did have was Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter whose disqualification from the 1988 100-meter dash was the doping scandal to end all doping scandals. That is, until a whistleblower revealed that not only were Russian athletes cheating en masse during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, but that the drug testers were helping them do it. Russia's home-field advantage extended to testers who swapped out bottles of tainted urine with clean ones through a hole in the laboratory's door.
For that, Russia was officially kicked out of these Games, though many Russians who can prove their chemical innocence will be able to compete as "Olympic Athletes From Russia."
Early weather reports for this week indicated Pyeongchang to have evening temperatures in the high teens and low 20s, cold enough that everyone in attendance will get complimentary heating pads and Team USA's jackets will have battery-operated warmers.
If that's the worst thing that happens this month on the Korean peninsula, the organizers will be as thrilled as the medalists.